When do you think the best decade stretch in original TV programming was?
Forget the problems of access, or the annoyances of shows disappearing or having to juggle 4 or 5 services. This is a question purely about the overall quality of content.
2004-2014. Spooky weird dramas that started with Lost and just kept going down the mystery train. You get some ace comedies like Black Books and Mighty Boosh. Start of the Netflix originals. Some of the best Doctor Who's. Just a lot going on.
Ehhh, quality is subjective. But i would argue that more television shows from the sixties stand the test of time more than most. There was still plenty of shit TV, but there seems to be more consistently well written episodes of the more popular shows vs any of the pre-cable era.
But you have to draw that line because of how cable changed watching TV. More networks, more specialized networks, and the possibility of uninterrupted viewing on the paid channels really make it difficult to compare anything from beyond the early eighties to anything from before then. A lot of shows got cancelled in the nineties (as an example) because they weren’t putting up ratings numbers like you could get when three networks were the only real options.
And, those major networks had better budgets across the board, so you run into that shifting things.
There’s also the issue with the big networks starting to get scared of dumping investment into quality writing and production as their share decreased. You got the ridiculous rise of sitcoms fronted by comedians as the end result of that. So that can make a decade look worse than it is.
But, yeah, there’s a lot of shows from the sixties that are still entertaining today. Less from the seventies and eighties, imo. The nineties, well, there was so much change I don’t think it’s going to be universally timeless like the sixties shows were.
You could make a good argument for the oughts, though. A lot of really bold choices there. Truly great shows that are still holding up. I just don’t feel that those represent as much of a percentage of what was aired.
Nah, you just have to pick the right shows. Gunsmoke, bonanza, and most of the other Westerns hold up very well. There are stylistic differences in the acting of course, and the writing makes different assumptions about what the audience has a default worldview, but if you want to compare eras, you can’t use those criteria because it skews to heavily to the most recent eras.
If you take the story structure, directing, cinematography, and acting as the criteria, you can make comparisons that are viable.
The Fugitive holds up against any show from any era, as a non western example. Marcus Welby did pretty good as a medical drama, though St Elsewhere and ER top it by a lot.
And you can’t dismiss the franchises. Mission: impossible and Star Trek. Both products of the sixties.
You’ve got cops and legal shows like Dragnet or Perry Mason that hold up okay, certainly no less well than some of the alternatives from later eras.
Oh! And The Prisoner! Perhaps the original mind fuck tv show.
You’ve got dark shadows, which doesn’t hold up as well as it could, but it’s still something that stands out and is enjoyable to new audiences.
You’ve got Dr Who as well, though I don’t think it’s fair to call it a sixties shows since it spans decades (and the sixties era is the weakest era imo).
And, you’ve got The Twilight Zone that also has spans in other eras, but the sixties was the best era of it. Yeah, it technically started in 59, but by the end of its run in the sixties, it was already of it the greatest shows in TV, period. Every credible list of great TV includes it. Again, it isn’t fair to call it a sixties show since it would return in other decades, but the episodes that comprise the original 5 season run in the sixties can stand up to anything from any decade.
And that’s just dramas. The sixties had some of the best sitcoms, and some of the best variety shows as well. Hell, variety shows were all over the place in the sixties lol, but the quality of those is great.
But what you said is why this kind of thing is often impossible. There’s just so much bias in “best of” discussions because it’s inherently subjective unless you find a way to step outside of what the individual likes and expects. To get there, someone has to have spent a shit ton of time watching shit from every era. A lot of TV watching. Even us eighties kids that were half raised by TV sets don’t usually have that much time in unless we’re also TV geeks to an extent. And you’d still have bias and subjectivity, just more informed.
Hell, I’m making the argument for the sixties, and my actual favorite shows ever aren’t from the sixties lol. I’m still biased towards what I was most exposed to.
I'm mostly into serialised content. I don't especially care for anthological shows, classical westerns or episodic procedural "monster of the week" formats (which was the prevailing style of TV up until the end of the 00s). I like 'long-form' high budget or at least mid budget serialised content with between 8-12 episodes a season that is now dominant. I also like primarily speculative fiction: sci-fi, dystopian, fantasy, post-apocalyptic settings that were much less common until the end of the 00s. I also like to see 'grit' and 'grimdark' settings, and it's undeniable that TV is now more risque, with more violence, nudity etc than it was then.
I also like to see non-American content, and in the 60s and 70s it was pretty much ONLY american and UK content (mostly American) that existed that was any worth. There was no Korean, German, French, Swedish etc dramas of any worth at all.
It did, but as far as I go I don't really like crime dramas - so those don't mean that much to me. But also international content and sci-fi/fantasy was much less developed then
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